COMMENTARY: Social media has changed high school football world

RAY CURREN

Published 12:00 am, Monday, September 26, 2011

The Milford Board of Education has apparently decided that if you can't beat them, you might as well try to work with them, apparently, as they've unveiled a slightly controversial social media policy for the new school year.

Basically, they're encouraging staff and students to use Twitter and Facebook in school, but for educational purposes.

Most school districts in the area block social media from their servers, meaning kids technically can't use Twitter or Facebook, but kids -- at least when it comes to technology -- are smart and are usually one step ahead of the people trying to keep them off the wildly popular websites.

"It's going to be a growing trend," Connecticut Association of Schools spokesman Vincent Mustaro said. "The use of social media can have profound educational benefits, and I applaud Milford for moving in the direction they are."

Said Milford Superintendent Elizabeth Feser: "It's a very important part of our lives. To suggest it isn't is short-sighted. We're recognizing technology is so pervasive in our society."

About now, you're probably thinking, "That's interesting, but what in the world does that have to do with SCC football?"

Well, I'm getting there.

For starters, about half of you are not reading this in your newspaper, but online. Twitter has become the primary fashion to get scores on Friday nights and to see stories from around the state, using the #ctfb hashtag (if you're having trouble with the terminology at any point here, ask your son or daughter).

My @currenscc handle allows me to tweet scores and interesting/humorous facts from games I'm at as well as to link to my columns when they're finished. Most of these columns are written on Sunday night, you used to have to wait until Wednesday or Thursday to read them in the paper, now they're available online Monday morning at the latest.

At the beginning (the first event I ever tweeted was the Law-Foran SCC baseball final in June 2009), high school kids were few and far between on Twitter, content to use the relatively new Facebook. But slowly but surely, Twitter -- quicker and slightly less personal than Facebook -- has become a staple at local high schools.

There's a scary side to it, though.

Whereas in my day, trash talking between teams was people saying things and then reporting them to opponents/rivals third-hand, now everything is there on the screen, ready to be printed out and placed on locker room bulletin boards.

There are ways to protect your tweets so they can only be seen by your followers, but even then, nothing said on Twitter is truly private (I guess you'd only have to ask Anthony Weiner how that works. If you could find him).

Which brings us to this week's Foran-Xavier contest, a mismatch any way you were going to look at it. Xavier, defending Class LL champion and favorites to repeat, against Division II Foran, coming off a tough loss to Branford.

As if Xavier needed more motivation for the game, the Falcons were inexplicably dropped from No. 1 to No. 2 in the New Haven Register writers' poll after holding Notre Dame to minus-1 yard in the first half two weeks ago.

(The explanation given by the Register's Mike Pucci was that a voter wasn't impressed by Xavier's offense and quarterback Tim Boyle was injured.)

Well, Xavier took their displeasure to Twitter, leading senior Ryan Murphy to tweet: "just found out there were 5 kids in the hospital Friday night from ND getting x rays. I guess it has to be 10 this week, to be #1."

You see what I'm getting at, here? As expected, Xavier trounced Foran 48-0, and luckily -- as far as I could tell, at least -- no hospitalization was needed for any Lions players (at the very least, the ambulance was not needed).

In Murphy's defense, if you look hard enough (you actually don't have to look hard at all, to be honest), you can find far, far worse, and that's why so many eyebrows were raised by the decision Milford made.

But as they say, it's not going anywhere soon.

"Twitter for me is not riling people up, or trying to get anybody mad or anything," Murphy said. "I like to know what's going on around the state. I love football, and I love that I can know what's going on quicker. It's just fun. I think as long as you can stay classy with it, it's fine."

The world often hates what it does not understand, and there is still plenty of the planet that does not understand the true power of social media and how it has irrevocably changed our world.

And -- be it ever so small in the big picture -- it has changed the high school football world as well.